> I'm not paying for anything until they remove the "this is the bubble we have prepared for you" recommendation algorithm.

Indeed, and what bothers me most is that it is "one" bubble. I wish there was a selection of tags to choose what mood I am in. Sometimes I only want math and science suggestions, sometimes I want to watch 3Dprinting or FreeCAD video's and other times I just want to discover some music. But Youtube mixes these three different moods together (even though I never play music on Youtube in the morning, nor watch math video's in the late evening). Please Youtube, let me choose my current 'bubble'.

The ios app lets you do that at least. At the top of the Home Screen I can choose “podcast”, “history” etc though within those it’s still recommendation based.

You can go directly to the subscriptions tab.

Or hell, Youtube has an API; You can write your own frontend.

Repitition reinforces the ads, just like in other 'learning', advertisers will always want us to retain their ads, I can't see the 'waterboard them with annoying ads' technique going away in any country that Capitalism manages to keep its talons embedded in.

Yeah, but I will never put winter tires on my car, because it's useless where I live. So, maybe, the targeting was subpar. Also, repetition reinforces me to enable ublock again.

The problem for me there is that those ads are usually complete garbage or outright scams. It's not for a real product that I could even buy.

Check out the 'Unhook' browser extension.